Anna Sorokin Says She’s Facing Death Threats After Bunny Abandonment Scandal
Anna “Delvey” Sorokin, the convicted scammer who stole tens of thousands of dollars from financial institutions and was once portrayed as a glamorous socialite in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, says she is now the target of hundreds of death threats after being linked to a bizarre rabbit abandonment incident in New York City.
The controversy began earlier this month when Sorokin, 34, posed with three rabbits for a photoshoot in Tribeca, clad in a pale blue dress and strappy heels. The whimsical images went up on Instagram, where Sorokin has more than a million followers.
Days later, the same rabbits were spotted in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, apparently dumped there, sparking outrage among animal advocates and online sleuths who quickly tied the abandoned pets to Sorokin’s shoot.
“I can never do right by these people,” Sorokin told NBC News. “It just seems to me like everything I do is just wrong.”
The discovery of the bunnies, one of whom was named Parker, was first documented by blogger Terry Chao, who said she and others rescued the trio after spotting posts in a neighborhood Facebook group. Chao later wrote on Instagram that the rabbits were “undeniably the same ones” as those in Sorokin’s photos.
From there, the accusations spread quickly. Sorokin said her inbox was flooded with messages so vitriolic that she now considers her account “unusable.” Some commenters told her she should kill herself; one message even suggested her skin should be turned into a rug.
“It seems like a lot of these people, just because they’re engaged in animal rescue, they feel like they’re entitled to insult you or talk to you or say anything because they’re hiding behind this thing that they’re doing.”
Sorokin insists she never abandoned the animals. She says she arranged the shoot by asking Instagram followers if they had pet rabbits she could borrow. Nineteen-year-old hairstylist Christian Batty responded, claiming access to a friend’s bunnies. Sorokin said she paid Batty for his help, including an Uber ride she believed would take the animals back to their home in Yonkers.
But screenshots of an Uber receipt Sorokin shared suggest the trip ended just south of Prospect Park, which is the very place the rabbits were found.
When confronted, Batty at first denied any wrongdoing, according to text messages Sorokin later published. Photographer Jasper Soloff, who shot the photos, distanced himself through his attorney, who emphasized Soloff had no involvement in securing or transporting the animals.
Eventually, Batty issued a statement on Instagram — later deleted — admitting that he released the rabbits in the park.
“When I realized the rabbits were being surrendered to me, I panicked. At 19, with no experience caring for animals, no pet-friendly housing, and no knowledge of available resources, I felt overwhelmed and made the worst possible choice. Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option.”
Sorokin, however, was unsympathetic to the age excuse.
“He’s old enough to move to New York and live on his own. He should have enough common sense to handle rabbits. We’re not, like, asking him to do anything that requires high IQ from him.”
The scandal comes at a precarious time for Sorokin, who is still under house arrest in Manhattan. At the same time, she is fighting deportation following her 2019 conviction on charges of grand larceny and theft of services. She is required to wear an ankle monitor and is prohibited from leaving a 75-mile radius around her apartment.
Sorokin says she fears the rabbit incident could hurt her immigration case, insisting she acted in good faith. “This time, I’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “And I had the best intentions, and it’s really frustrating.”
She has since donated $1,000 to All About Rabbits Rescue and defended the use of leashes during the shoot, pushing back at critics who claimed she endangered the animals. “I’m not a bunny professional,” she admitted. “We would put them down for, I don’t know, a minute or two, take a picture and pick them up. We were not walking them by any means. And they seemed to be happy.”
For Sorokin, who once fooled Manhattan’s elite into believing she was a wealthy heiress, the bunny backlash is the latest reminder of how her every move is scrutinized. What started as a seemingly harmless photoshoot has ballooned into another public scandal, complete with viral outrage, accusations of cruelty, and a fresh wave of notoriety.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.